You mean they would have to hire and fire a non-disclosed but high number of times a staff to bring their salary down. To be able to do that, they would have to win each time against any other people willing to hire a staff (and we know how many people complain about high salary staff, so the concurrence would be there). Finally at one time, in fact there is no such time since that could go even lower, that staff would have a quite low salary and that manager would be happy.
To do that they would have to buy him X times, meaning a lot of money spent, firing him X times meaning less but still a good amount of money. In the end, to save some money, they would have paid a really big amount of money (and quite honestly a good chance to lost one bid once). I'm wild enough to bet that the money saved would a lot less than the money paid upfront.
The one way that could work would be a large group of people doing that to lower the salary of high level staff. Even there, they would risk that any willing farm around the world would get that staff in the end and not them. But as a big group, I guess the international consortium of farms could work to lower the high level staff's salary.
All in all, one individual couldn't beat the system like that. Several ? I doubt so, but maybe. And I'm not sure there is not a lower limit to staff salary.
The processus you describe is true, but I wouldn't worry too much, nor would call that a bug. Foolish abuse, yes, but I invite anyone to attempt that.
The one thing that makes it slightly more exploitable is that there's no way for any other user to find those staff members on the transfer list; if you search for staff, you can not specify a minimum skilled staff member; the lowest possible is basic (2). (At least given the search tools on the site; I'm not sure if the BBAPI has a search feature for staff that might accept a skill level of 1 or if there's a way to modify the data sent to BB to perform the search).
So for example, two of the level 1 PR managers I fired in the past week are currently available for bid. Nobody else would see them, so I could be guaranteed to win the auction with a 1k bid and a ~1700 salary. I could see eventually staggering the hiring and firings enough to get the weekly salaries down to under 1000, and eventually that would become profitable vs. the baseline of 2k.
Of course, I agree that it's a highly unlikely circumstance and dubious whether it would even be worth the effort to go into, since saving a couple of thousand a week is inconsequential.
